Nicolai Haugsted
Trump suddenly dumps glass of water during speech before declaring climate change a scam.
Donald Trump arrived in Texas on Thursday with an economic message to sell.
The president’s visit to a Peterbilt truck manufacturing plant in Denton marked the opening stop of an aggressive campaign swing ahead of November’s midterm elections, with tariffs, American manufacturing and Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton all featuring prominently.
Climate change eventually entered the conversation as well.
Trump used part of his speech to dismiss global warming concerns and revisit an old remark by Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Somewhere along the way, the president picked up a glass of water, announced that he was not particularly fond of drinking it — and poured it onto the ground.
“I’m not a big drinker of water,” Trump said before dumping the contents and continuing his remarks, according to The Irish Star.
Trump turns to climate change
The unusual gesture accompanied a broader attack on climate science.
Trump argued that previous warnings about global warming had failed to materialize and invoked Ocasio-Cortez while making his case.
“We’re supposed to all be dead. AOC said that, right? That didn’t work out because the planet got cooler,” Trump said.
“In fact, you know, the ice that was melting, it’s right now just set a record. It’s the biggest ice cube that’s ever been in the history of the world.”
Current scientific measurements do not support that characterization.
Arctic sea ice reached its annual minimum on September 12 at approximately 4.60 million square kilometers, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. Rather than setting a record for unusually extensive ice, the figure tied for the tenth-lowest minimum in the nearly 48-year satellite record.
Scientists also note that the 20 lowest Arctic sea-ice minimums in the satellite record have all occurred during the past 20 years.
‘It’s a scam’
Trump continued by attacking the terminology surrounding climate change.
“So they changed it from global warming to climate change, because climate change… if it gets hot, cold, if it rains, if it snows, nobody knows the difference. It’s climate change,” Trump said.
“No, it’s a scam, and they’re doing the scam with data centers, by the way, that’s a new thing because they want us to be unsuccessful.”
Climate scientists distinguish between short-term weather fluctuations and long-term changes in average climate conditions. The terms “global warming” and “climate change” also describe related but different concepts rather than one simply replacing the other.
Trump has repeatedly rejected the scientific consensus surrounding human-driven climate change and has rolled back environmental regulations during his second administration.
AOC’s old remark returns
Ocasio-Cortez provided Trump with another target.
Back in January 2019, the New York Democrat made her much-discussed “12 years” remark while speaking about younger generations’ fears surrounding climate change.
“Millennials and people, you know, Gen Z and all these folks that come after us, are looking up and we’re like, ‘the world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change,’ and your biggest issue is how are we gonna pay for it?” Ocasio-Cortez said at the time.
Her wording was not a literal conclusion reached by the United Nations’ climate scientists.
The 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report underlying much of the discussion said global carbon dioxide emissions would need to fall sharply by around 2030 to improve the chances of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Scientists subsequently pushed back against portraying 2030 as a cliff after which the world suddenly ends.
Ocasio-Cortez herself later said her “world ending” language was not intended literally.
Trump came to Texas with politics on his mind
Thursday’s stop had a considerably more immediate political purpose.
Trump is embarking on an intensive campaign schedule designed to boost Republican turnout before the November midterms. Texas and Oklahoma were selected for the opening day of a tour expected to take the president around the country throughout October.
Peterbilt’s Denton plant gave Trump an opportunity to promote his tariffs and domestic manufacturing policies directly to hundreds of workers.
Trump told the audience that PACCAR CEO Preston Feight had credited his policies with helping the facility.
“He said your policies here made this place so successful,” Trump said. “Without your policies, we’d be a whole different ballgame, and I want to thank you. You’ve let us thrive.”
Paxton also joined Trump onstage.
The Texas attorney general is running for Senate against Democratic state Representative James Talarico, making the appearance part economic address and part campaign rally.
